Summary
Joel Dunham is a Senior Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building backend and distributed business systems for startups, research institutions, and open-source projects. He specializes in Clojure and Python, functional programming, and designing robust integrations and APIs—recently delivering billing and customer-experience integrations at CircleCI and joining Splash as a senior engineer. Joel pairs pragmatic engineering with rigorous research instincts from a Ph.D. in Linguistics (UBC), which has informed his work on NLP, language-data platforms and deployable academic tooling like Dative/OLD. He has a track record of improving system performance and testability—reducing processing time by up to 80% on archival pipelines and creating generative and Gherkin-based test suites adopted across teams. Based in Surrey, BC, he bridges academic rigor and production-grade engineering, often turning specification-as-data into reproducible, well-documented services.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Linguistics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Linguistics at The University of British Columbia
Computational Linguistics Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics Natural Language Processing at Summer Institute, Linguistic Society of America
Italian, French, blackfoot